Charles II of Spain

“ Spain might justly have abandoned the Family Compact after the Falkland incident, and for a time that treaty did suffer a partial eclipse. Charles III felt that in future he could count only on his own forces, but he continued to increase and equip them, for the danger from England was as great as ever. Self-interest inevitably brought Spain and France together, and with the appearance of the warlike Aranda in France, late in the year 1773, as Spanish ambassador to that court, plans with a view to meeting the common enemy were again discussed. ”

“ So rapidly did Spain degenerate, that, upon the close of the Austrian dynasty, with all the natural advantages of the country, the best harbors and sea-coast in Europe, the (p. 096) richest soil, and the finest climate, and with the possession of the Indies also, the people were the poorest, the most ignorant, and the most helpless in Europe. The death of Charles II., a miserable, afflicted, superstitious, priest-ridden monarch, left Spain without a king, and the vacant throne became the prize of any monarch in Europe who could raise and send across the Pyrenees the largest army. ”

“ Charles was then fifteen, just the age of the century, nine years younger than Henry, five years younger than Francis. Amid the tumult of the opening Reformation in 1519, the aged Maximilian also died, departed not unwillingly, one fancies, from an age whose intricacies had grown too many for his simple soul. The young King of Spain thus became lord of all the vast Hapsburg possessions of Austria, Bohemia, the Netherlands and so on. ”

“ With the exception of Austria, whose candidate for the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles, was unwilling to recognize the validity of the document which had chosen the grandson of Louis XIV, the European nations were disposed to view the accession of Philip V (1700-1746) with favor, especially since the French monarch consented to the conditions imposed in the will of Charles II that the crowns of France and Spain should be independent and never be united in a single person. ”

“ The success of the American Revolution was to be related in no small degree to the loss of Spain’s colonial empire. The failure of the French Revolution was to produce a powerful despot who was to bring Spain, under Charles IV, to the lowest point she had reached since the days of Charles II. Nevertheless, the reign of Charles III is to be considered as something more than a brilliant moment in history without ultimate effect. The internal reforms were of permanent benefit to Spain and even to the Americas, capable of utilization under the more democratic systems of the future. ”

“ Charles V had, indeed, destroyed the liberties of Spain; but that had been done too recently for its full evil to be felt in Philip's time. A people cannot be debased in a single generation; and the Spaniards under Charles V and Philip II proved the truth of the remark that no nation is ever so formidable to its neighbors, for a time, as a nation which, after being trained up in self-government, passes suddenly under a despotic ruler. ”

“ If Charles himself was not unpopular in Spain, even though he kept his mother Joanna, the legitimate queen, under lock and key, that he might reign as Charles the First in Spain, his Germans and his Germanism were devoutly hated. The next Carlos who reigned in Spain, correctly styled the Second, was nearly a fool, but Charles III. was the best and most enlightened of the sovereigns of Spain until the days of Alfonso XII. Charles IV. abdicated under pressure of Napoleon in 1808, and then Don Carlos the Pretender naturally assumed the style and title of Charles the Fifth. ”

“ In answer to a long list of petitions, the King promised to learn to speak Spanish; to forbid illegal exportation of gold and silver; to grant no further offices or letters of naturalisation to foreigners; to keep his brother in Spain till the succession should be assured; not to alienate Crown property; and not to give up Navarre.
Charles then hurried on to hold Cortes at Saragossa. The Aragonese proved more stubborn. Freed from Ferdinand's strong hand, the nobles had shaken off all respect for the Crown, and moreover, Charles was thoroughly distrusted. ”

“ Carlos had been declared of age in 1675; he was utterly incapable and, though he can scarce be said to have had favorites, under such ministers as the Duke of Medinaceli and the Count of Oropesa, Spain sank deeper in misery and degradation until his death in 1700. The kingdom was reduced to the last extremity, without money, without industry, without means of defence to resist the aggressive wars of Louis XIV, or to defend the colonies from the ravages of buccaneers. The population is said to have shrunk to 5,000,000 ”

“ We should have been much more justified in dreading a close understanding between the Spanish and French crowns than in hoping for the restoration of a Spanish-German anti-French constellation after the analogy of Charles V.; a king of Spain can only carry out Spanish policy, and the Prince by assuming the crown of the country would become a Spaniard. ”

“ Charles promised that the official documents should immediately be finished; and the ceremony be performed with the earliest dispatch. He put into the Duke's hand, his final renunciation, for himself and his posterity, of all claims on the succession of Spain; and he gave him written bonds for the payment, at certain seasons, of a large debt of many millions, owed by the Empire to the Spanish monarchy. He also signed several new articles to the secret treaty; one of which was, to relinquish the Netherlands to Don Carlos, as a dowry with his intended bride. ”

“ THE HERO OF THE CARLISTS. Spain for years past has had its double king,—a king in possession and a king in exile, a holder of the throne and an aspirant to the throne. For the greater part of a century one has rarely heard of Spain without hearing of the Carlists, for continually since 1830 there has been a princely claimant named Charles, or Don Carlos, struggling for the crown. ”

“ Christ died nineteen hundred years ago, and Spain is a Christian nation. She has set up more crosses in more lands, beneath more skies, and under them has butchered more people than all the other nations of the earth combined. God grant that before another Christmas morning the last vestige of Spanish tyranny and oppression will have vanished from the western hemisphere. ”

“ About the middle of the eighteenth century, all the enlightened men of Europe exclaimed against that company, and ardently desired its extermination; and, although many works were published against it, and the voices of many religious orders were raised in denouncing it to the pontifical throne and to the public, such was the power and dexterity with which it neutralised these hostile dispositions, that nobody dared to attack its front, until a king of Spain, the illustrious Charles III., undertook that great work, and carried it on to its consummation with as much resolution as ability. ”

“ Before his death, however, aware of [163] the coalition against the throne in the event of no successor being named, Charles willed his dominions to the electoral Prince of Bavaria, whose mother was a daughter of Philip IV. But the prince died before the king, and this reopened the question of succession, which will be treated in the next chapter.
It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that a barren or a blood-fertilized soil sometimes produces the most luxuriant growth and yields the richest harvests. So with Spain. ”

“ A KING IN CAPTIVITY. Two great rivals were on the thrones of France and Spain,—Francis I., who came to power in France in 1515, and Charles I., who became king of Spain in 1516. In 1519 they were rivals for the imperial power in Germany. Charles gained the German throne, being afterwards known as the emperor Charles V., and during the remainder of their reigns these rival monarchs were frequently at war. A league was formed against the French king by Charles V., Henry VIII. of England, and Pope Leo X., as a result of which the French were driven from the territory of Milan, in Italy. ”

“ The sounds of war died away before they reached the foot of the Pyrenees. Spain, it is true, sent forth her sons, from time to time, to serve under the banners of Charles; and it was in that school that was perfected the admirable system of discipline and tactics which, begun by the Great Captain, made the Spanish infantry the most redoubtable in Europe. But the great body of the people felt little interest in the success of these distant enterprises, where success brought them no good. Not that the mind of Spain was inactive, or oppressed with the lethargy which stole over it in a later age. ”

“ When municipal independence likewise perished in the defeat of the Comunidades, the only power left standing in Spain was that of the throne, which thus became absolute and all-pervading. The new absolutism was embodied in the self-effacing declaration of the Córtes of Valladolid, in 1523, to Charles V, that the laws and customs were subject to the king, who could make and revoke them at his pleasure, for he was the living law. ”

“ Several of the Spanish statesmen of the last Century were very superior men, the kingdom itself was strong, and the Indies did not experience any disturbances calculated seriously to embarrass the mother-country. Then the close union that was brought about between France and Spain, in the early days of Charles III. and the last days of Louis XV., had no unimportant effect on the fortunes of Spain. ”

“ It must be confessed that the grandees, who had on this occasion complained of Charles's foreign expeditions, and neglect of his Spanish dominions, did not pursue the system best calculated to reconcile him to a residence among them. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by social intercourse, for making amends for the repulse he had suffered from the cortez, they appeared desirous of rendering the amount of humiliation which awaited him in Spain a counterpoise to his triumphs in his other dominions. ”

“ Charles VIII. and Lewis XII., the two contemporaries of King Henry, spent all their energy in the attempt to annex the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, to which they had some shadowy claim of succession. Their schemes called into the field the sovereigns whose position would have been imperilled by the French conquest of Italy—the Emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, whose marriage had created the united kingdom of Spain. ”

“ Then came the magnificent reign of Charles V. with more gifts from fortune—the imperial crown, if not a substantial benefit to Spain, still bringing dignity and éclat. But under this glittering surface there had commenced even then a decline. Under Philip II. she was still magnificent, Europe was bowing down to her, but the decline was growing more manifest; and with the accession of his puny son, Philip III., there was little left but a brilliant past, which a proud and retrospective nation was going to feed upon for over three centuries. ”

“ In this respect, as in so many others, Spain was still in the Middle Ages. The fact that there was no permanent arrangement for providing for the food of the army is enough in itself to account for many of its disasters. If, like the British, the Spaniards had possessed money to pay for what they took, things might have worked somewhat better. Or if, like the French, they had possessed an organized military train, and no scruples, they might have contrived to get along at the cost of utterly ruining the country-side. ”

“ The King of Spain desires that between the Pillars of Hercules a third pillar shall arise, to recall to posterity, and to the navigators of both the new and the old world, the memory of the officers and men of that French army which drove back the English, saved thirty thousand Spaniards, pacified the ancient Baetica, and regained for France her natural allies.’ The rather puzzling passage concerning the ‘thirty thousand Spaniards saved’ refers to the prisoners of Ocaña and the Sierra Morena, whom the French, according to the King, ‘recognized as brethren led astray by the common enemy. ”

“ Every foreign power could plunder and insult with impunity the heir of Charles the Fifth. Into such a state had the mighty kingdom of Spain fallen, while one of its smallest dependencies, a country not so large as the province of Estremadura or Andalusia, situated under an inclement sky, and preserved only by artificial means from the inroads of the ocean, had become a power of the first class, and treated on terms of equality with the Courts of London and Versailles. ”

“ At the Spanish court, meanwhile, affairs were in a scandalous condition, for the queen regent was ruled at first by a German Jesuit, and later foisted into favour an agreeable young man who had been merely a page, and whose highest conception of pleasure was to occupy the place of honour at a bullfight. If it may be said of the reign of Philip IV that it was the most disastrous to Spain since that of King Roderick the Goth, little more can be claimed for that of Charles II, his son, who came into the succession in 1675, at the age of fourteen. ”

“ As king of the Two Sicilies Charles began there the work of internal reform which he afterwards continued in Spain. Foreign ministers who dealt with him agreed that he had no great natural ability, but he was honestly desirous to do his duty as king, and he showed good judgment in his choice of ministers. The chief minister in Naples, Tanucci, had a considerable influence over him. On the death of his half-brother Ferdinand VI. he became king of Spain, and resigned the Two Sicilies to his third son Ferdinand. As king of Spain his foreign policy was disastrous. ”